"Bruce McAllister - Poison" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcallister Bruce)

****

After breakfast, he went to his bathroom, picked up the bag carefully,
and headed out into the great olive grove toward the place where the trees
were dead and the witches lived in their stone huts. His friends would have
told him not to—that only bad would come of it, “even if you are right to be
sad and angry, Gianni”—and the boy was surprised he was doing it. He was
supposedly “shy,” wasn’t he? This is what people said. Why did it take the
death of his cat for him to be brave? And was it really bravery? Or was it
simply the need to tell the truth—to stand before the old woman who’d done
it and ask her, “Why did you poison my cat?” but also to say, “I would not
kill what you love, Signora.”

****

He would begin, he decided, with the first stone hut, the one closest
to his family’s house on the hill. The witch who lived there would have found
it easiest to poison his cat, wouldn’t she? Whether she had put the poison
by her hut or in the olive trees nearer his house wouldn’t have mattered.
Nevis had never gone far, so the chances she had traveled to the huts of
the two witches higher up the hill made no sense. It was the closest witch
who’d done it, he was sure. He had never laid eyes on her, but he had
heard her in her hut when he and his friends had snuck in close one day,
hiding in the little cave on the sunless side of the hill and watching from a
distance, hoping to see her and yet afraid to. They never did, but they knew
other boys who had.

Her teeth, a boy from the wharf had told them, were so bad you’d get
nightmares if you looked at them. Yes, he’d seen her. Things were crawling
in her mouth, and her tongue had made a noise like a viper’s hiss. Another
boy, Carlo—one who lived near the castle that overlooked the bay—hadn’t
seen her himself, but his older brothers had, years ago. They’d seen her
hut turn green, tremble as if it were alive, even move toward them, just
before she’d looked up, seen them and shouted. They’d run, and as they
had, they’d felt her green breath touch their backs. Days later they could still
feel something crawling on them, and one of the brothers had scratched
himself bloody trying to stop the itch.

****

When he glimpsed the hut through the trees, he stopped. It was
green, yes, but that was because of the lichen. Everything in these
groves—tree trunks, walls, and paths—had bright green lichen on it. And
something moved, yes, but it was only an olive branch scraping across the
hut’s thatched roof. The trees here were not as dead as he remembered
them. They had leaves. They were very alive. Why he remembered them
as dead, he didn’t know, unless it was that fear had made it seem so. He
was not afraid today, so the trees were alive and the sunlight bright—was
that the reason?